Ungsan Kim
Office Information
202 South Thayer Street
5165 STB
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-1608
phone: 734.936.8807
Visual Culture; Korea; China; Literature
Education/Degree:: PhD University of Washington, 2019
About
Current research interests:
I am a scholar of cinema and media in Asia. My research draws on film and media theory as well as queer studies to critically engage with the politics and aesthetics of Asian cinema. I have substantive interests in cinematic temporality and spatiality, queer cinema, and inter-Asian cinema. I have published articles on queer Korean cinema in Korea Journal and the Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema and contributed a chapter to Rediscovering Korean Cinema (Ed. Sangjoon Lee, U of Michigan Press).
Current projects:
Currently, I am working on a book project, Cruising the Cityscape: Queer Temporality in Contemporary Asian Cinema. With this project, I demonstrate how contemporary queer Asian cinema as an aesthetic mode of production provides refreshed conception of queerness and temporality. I also explore how queer Asian cinema engages with audiovisual experimentations as a means of defying normative ways of representing cinematic subjects. I especially focus on the political dimension of queer temporality that challenges the primacy of progressive history by analyzing the representation of queer kinship, transient intimacies, temporal disorientation, and the deviant use of narrative and cinematic techniques in these cinemas. In addition to the monograph, I am also preparing a chapter on the representation of queer desires in contemporary Korean literature for the Routledge Companion to Korean Literature (Ed. Heekyoung Cho) as well as an edited volume on contemporary queer Asian cinema.
Teaching interests:
I have taught a wide range of undergraduate courses, including Korean cinema, East Asian cinema, martial arts cinema, the history of American horror films, writing about films, and LGBTQ literature. In addition to teaching courses on Korean and Asian cinema, I am also interested in teaching digital media aesthetics, queer and gender issues in Asian cinema and literature, inter-Asian cinema, and Korean popular culture.
